My 8 year old decided to be a coin collector, focused on collecting coins from other nations. We found a cool website (numista.com) where people from all over the world trade coins. Basically, you post what you have to trade, and what you want, and try to match up fair trades.
In researching exchange rates, I found this website. A very well done site for exchange rates. You can select any currency and see it's vaule in all other countries at the same time.
http://coinmill.com/USD_calculator.html#USD=.01
Just fooling around, I put in one US cent, and found that it was worth ~127 million Zimbabwe dollars. A dime makes you a billionaire in Zimbabwe. Of course, a loaf a bread probably costs a cool trillion.
xe.com puts 1 USD at 361.90 ZWD
That can't be right. Here are some quotes regarding Zimbabwe:
Inflation 231 000 000% (official, July 08)
89.7 × 10^21% (HHIZ, 14 Nov 08)
6.5 × 10^108% (Forbes Asia, 22 Dec 08)
Currently, the government limits cash withdrawals to ZW$100 billion per day, which is less than the cost of a loaf of bread.
It also showed a monthly war pension currently is ZW$109 billion (GBP 0.37, USD 0.74)
74 US cents = 109 billion ZWD in 2008.
I know a guy whose brother is in Zimbabwe. He showed me a million Z note, or was it 100 million, that was essentially worthless.
He said that people trade in the currencies of neighboring countries or US$.
Where it went wrong was letting Mugabe and his friends steal the country. They nationalized all the foreign holdings, mismanaged them so little is being produced, and converted everything they could to their personal accounts.
Grids & Datums of Zimbabwe
